Image 01 Image 03

August 2018

Rep. Beto O'Rourke backed out of the first scheduled debate with Senator Cruz. Scheduled for Friday, August 31, the debate was to be the first of five (or six, O'Rourke wanted a final debate in his hometown, El Paso).

Hours after the death of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) was announced, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed renaming the Russell Senate office building the McCain Building.  Soon-to-be former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) quickly added his name to the proposal. The idea, however, has been met with push back from other Senators, including McCain's good friend Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and from the GOP base.  The idea is a bad one for a number of reasons, but if the goal was to unify the Senate GOP, it's working quite well.

A shocking 11-page letter by a former apostolic nuncio (a papal diplomat) to the United States has rocked the Catholic world after it was widely released last week. The testimony offered by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016, accuses several senior church officials of complicity in covering up allegations of sexual abuse of minors and young men by former Archbishop of Washington D.C., Theodore McCarrick. Viganò also claims that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI, chose to ignore those sanctions, and allowed McCaarrick to become a power-player in determining church appointments in this country.

Over 100 Facebook employees have spoken out against the social media giant's "intolerant" political culture after one of them posted about the problem on the company's internal message board. Senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige posted a two-page memo titled "We Have a Problem With Political Diversity," which claims that employees "are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."

Tuesday had a bunch of primaries, but Florida and Arizona caught my eyes. Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a progressive backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), managed to win the Democrat primary for the Florida governor race and is the first black nominee for the position. Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), defeated former state senator Kelli Ward and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the Republican primary to take over retiring Sen. Jeff Flake's seat.

A new poll conducted by Emerson shows the Texas Senate race in a dead heat, which Cruz leading by one tiny little point. That said, the poll only had a sample size was small, as only 550 registered voters were surveyed, making it the second smallest sampling of the election season. The only poll with a smaller sample size (of 441 likely voters) showed Cruz up by only two points.

CNN has raced for the bottom by aligning itself with #TheResistance, and as a result of its Trump derangement, the cable news network has been plagued with numerous #FakeNews scandals this year.  Last year, CNN earned the dubious distinction of being the only media outlet to be named a whopping four times in the 2017 Fake News Awards list of top ten purveyors of fake news. It's little surprise, then, that CNN's ratings are tanking.  And I mean really really tanking.  The vaunted “Chris Cuomo Primetime” has fewer viewers not only than Fox News but than HGTV.  This makes sense; after all, watching paint dry is far preferable to watching Cuomo's antics.

When it comes to judges, the President has a lot in common with North Carolina. While the White House finds itself thwarted on an almost hourly basis by federal district judges, the Tar Heel State languishes under the iron heel of the Fourth Circuit, a federal appellate court based in Richmond, Virginia.  Once deeply conservative, the Fourth Circuit is now almost as liberal as the Ninth, and for a very simple reason: President Obama got to fill vacancies Senate Democrats kept from Bush in 2007 and 2008. (The vacancy jockeying began long before Trump.)  The transformed Fourth Circuit quickly got to work striking down North Carolina's laws on voter IDs, transgender bathroom accommodations, public prayer, and, of course, election districting, from races for lowly school boards to those for Congress.

Overall the jobs reports during President Donald Trump have shown stellar economic growth with low unemployment and almost more jobs than job seekers. More jobs means more money for people, which means more money poured into the economy. More news came out today as the research group The Conference Board revealed that consumer confidence is the highest its been since October 2000.

The fatal stabbing of a German by a group of migrants has triggered riots in the eastern German city of Chemnitz. Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets on Monday night calling for an end to Chancellor Merkel's open borders policy, media reports say.